A methodology to enhance effort estimation in software development process

Abstract

Effort Estimation is the most significant task in software development process. Based on the requirements analysis and feasibility studies in the software development life cycle, the development process and the methodology to be followed for development are decided. The types of resources needed for development, the number of resources needed and the duration of the project are identified by the project managers and software developers. Hence, effort estimation becomes a crucial task and it is usually done before initiating the project development activities. But, during the software development process, the requirements of the customers may vary and it may change the scope of the project also. Due to this, the values for the parameters used for estimating the effort may also change. Hence, the effort estimation done at the initial phase of project development may not be reliable and accurate. Therefore, it is observed that an enhancement in effort estimation is needed to provide accurate and reliable estimated value to the developers at any phase in the software development life cycle. Hence, proposing a methodology to enhance effort estimation has become the major objective in this research work. A framework has been developed and deployed in the cloud as software as a service. This framework estimates the effort of a project by employing Use Case Point method. The information about the project and its domain, information about the environmental factors and information about the technical factors are given as input in the framework. The framework calculates the duration of the project by applying Use Case Point method based on the input values. The framework also stores the information about the project and its domain, the Use Case Points and the estimated duration in a database. This becomes the use case repository which contains the use case and actor information along with project information, duration. It has a vast collection of project information across the domains. Thus, it acts as a reference framework for the developer and the project manager to compare and calculate the duration of the new project under development. newline